the above gleaming pyramid

At St. Louis Cemetery

Friday:
Kanye West/Jay-Z, Watch the Throne
Curren$y, Pilot Talk II
UGK, Jive Records Presents: UGK Chopped & Screwed
Lee "Scratch" Perry, Kung Fu Meets the Dragon

Saturday:
Sane Our Cemeteries St. Louis Cemetery Tour, New Orleans, LA
Reuben at Stein's Deli, New Orleans, LA
The Myrtles and the Graveyard Lovers at Chelsea's, Baton Rouge, LA

Sunday:
Hot sausage breakfast platter at Franks's
David Bowie,The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak
Bruce Springsteen, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes

• A whole album of chopped & screwed remixes is a long slog just to hear UGK's "Fuck My Car" given the codeine reggae treatment but it's kinda worth it. Sometimes it takes degradation to reveal what's inside a thing.
  
  
  
  
• Though, there are so many things in the world to enjoy, like the St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans which I've never visited before this hot weekend, things bigger than the myth of Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen
  
  
  
  whose tomb is generally rendered a low-rent Twombly with XXX's scrawled by dumbasses looking to participate in easy goth hokum. Um, don't desecrate graves?
  
  
  Maya akimbo, surveying a crumbling city of the dead...
  
  
  ..right next to where Homer Plessy is laid to rest.
  
  
  
  Nicolas Cage bought himself a plot right around the corner in the same storied cemetery and had built upon it the above gleaming pyramid, something between a pile of cocaine and a manifestation of pure ego. No one dares desecrate Nic's grave, for he might actually have a secret entrance to it so he can wait inside in a state of ecstatic readiness, poised to go Face Off 2: Electric Boogaloo on any who but uncap a Sharpie in the radius of his divine sensitivity.
  
  
• The more I listen to Ziggy Stardust, the more I think it might be the greatest rock 'n' roll album ever made, fully understanding that it is meta-rock of the highest order. I also understand I might like meta-rock more than the thing itself.
  
  
  
  But really, what doesn't "Starman" have within its bounds? We will be singing the chorus as a lullaby to post-Earth children tethered to their cribs in the space colonies.
  
  
• It was a weekend of swimming pools and lawnmowers and great breakfasts and friends and after the last swimming party I found myself in the position of bringing all the girls home, or at least four of them including my own (which seems a weird thing to say because, own? In what sense is that true even if it's the right word for it?) scattered around the city and it took a full hour of driving, listening to the conversations shift and bob with each drop-off and I'm thankful for a lot of things in my life, but maybe most of all is I love all these kids with which mine is enmeshed. They go to a parfait of schools and the circle remains unbroken largely because the parents all like each other. We are all just off enough to fit with each other and not really fit elsewhere, which is a particularly sweet spot in which to live.
  
  
• Speaking of all that, I watched every clip available for Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a documentary on Anselm Kiefer who, like Bowie, engages in a sort of meta-art, creating art that trumps the art it meta's. This clip gives me chills.
  
  
  All other art making is like watching paint dry.
  
  

another star in the negative space

Cabaret Voltaire, Red Mecca and The Original Sound of Sheffield, '78/'82, Best Of
Chrome, Blood on the Moon
Gong, Magic Brother
Hawkwind, Zones
C. J. Chenier, Can't Sit Down

• Continuing the Anglo-mosquito, depresso-mutato rock block that got me through yesterday. I find a Geiger counter, data poetry charm in this music. It is a dream catcher for those too poorly wired to sleep. It is the juice fresh squeezed from a Timex quartz crystal.
  
  
  Cabaret Voltair, "Silent Command"
  
  
• I read this thing about the Tea Party in Ohio this morning and ugh, I hate reading diatribes from the opposition to neo-conservatism as much as I hate hearing the original sentiment, which I do in fact personally oppose. In forwarding reports like these, I feel I am loading cannons for both ships so I can go row my sad little boat around between them afterwards. That said, Timothy Snyder's "As Ohio Goes:  A Letter from Tea-Party Country"  in the New York Review of Books exposes lumpen pawnism with such beautiful, cocksure prose:
  
  It is hard not to smile, I’ll admit, at farmers who plant genetically-engineered seeds six days a week and (like Michele Bachmann) deny evolution on the seventh. One church in Clinton County features a giant pink plastic replica of a horseshoe crab in its garden. Every so often Evel Knievel’s former bodyguard jumps it with a motorcycle. The arthropod is a refugee from the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where it took up space that was needed for a parking lot. The crab is supposed to prove that evolution never happened, since its basic form has remained unchanged.
  
  
• Smart. There are two indelible symbols of the childhood America I witnessed celebrating itself in 1976. The first is the then ubiquitous bicentennial logo (above), implying America's own dubious greatness with another star in the negative space formed by closed circuits of open associations. The designer, Bruce N. Blackburn, also did the NASA logo, the other icon that encapsulates my frittering nostalgia for when America was awesome.
  
  
  Chrome, "Blood on the Moon"
  
  
• The second symbol is Evel Knievel. The original poster for this video of Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River Canyon  (embedding disabled) said:
  
  For you's that may not know anything about your community or forgot, did anyone else remember Evil [sic] when he came to your community in the middle 70's? I did!
  
  Another commented.
  
  @ChuckieInMT My dad painted the Skycycle. I used to sit in it while he was working on it. I still have pictures of the progress of it.
  
  
• Imagine! I never met Evel Knievel but I did see Elvis' car, and I think I saw the Harlem Globetrotters play a hapless high school team in an exhibition match in Keokuk, IA, circa 1977 or so, but I'm not sure. I may just be wanting to have seen it. I got the cousin who I would have likely gone with working on a fact-check.
  
  While looking for data myself, I came across this in Joel Zoss and John Bowman's Diamonds in the Rouge: the Untold Story of Baseball, about Bud Fowler, the first African-American to play professional baseball. He signed for Keokuk's team, The Keokuks, for the single year they played in the Western League in 1885, and bounced around a number of other teams for the remainder of the century. Then he formed...
  
  ...a crack squad that combined Harlem Globetrottter-like showmanship with demonstrations of athletic mastery. He had previously engaged in walking and running exhibitions; his baseball survival skills reached their zenith in 1899 when he organized the All-American Black Tourists, whom he made available for play attired in full-dress suits with silk umbrellas. (link)
  
  
  The Keokuks 1885 lineup.
  Identifications: Back row: Schomberg, O'Brien, Bud Fowler, Corcoran, Decker. Middle row: Harrington. Front row: Kennedy, Van Dyke, Dugdale, Hudson, Harter.
  
  
• Edited to add: this blackest of all black planets just discovered deserves its own bullet point among the stars in negative space.
  
  

the lineage of innovation

• Wednesdays are fried chicken day at the State Police Cafeteria. If you know me at all, you will know that a civil servant lunch, the kind toward which old men with pensions look forward every day, prepared by prison trustees who have a sweet repartee with the cops and involves fried chicken and green beans with new potatoes and rice and gravy is right where I'm at, spiritually speaking. It at least deserves its own top-level bullet point.

Last night:
Ringo Starr, Very Best Of
T. Rex, Electric Warrior
Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer

Today:
Heaven 17, Penthouse and Pavement
Bush Tetras, Boom in the Night
Fad Gadget, Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey

• I had something really potent to say about Heaven 17, something I sweated out while walking the dog back from dropping Maya off at school, but it's gone now. Just as well. I was playing Electric Warrior for Maya last night trying to sell her on it and she wasn't buying, and then suddenly, I wasn't either. That Malcolm Gladwell book has a great chapter about Ron Popeil and the lineage of innovation and sales inherited from his father Samuel. There is a great vignette of the producers at QVC letting out a cheer when Ron Popeil finishes his record-breaking set. We have an offshoot of the Pocket Fisherman - literally, it shoots the hook out in a capsule-like projectile that becomes the bobber - tangled up in its own line in a corner of the trunk of our car. It was the only thing Maya wanted for Christmas a while back.
  
  
  Heaven 17, "Let's All Make a Bomb"
  
  
• I continue my smittenness with Eleanor Friedberger in this week's Record Crate for 225. After being sufficiently bored shitless with T. Rex, Maya asked if we could listen to that "Inn of the Seventh Ray-ray-ray-ray-ray" woman. Yes. Forever.
  
  
  Eleanor Friedberger, "Inn of the Seventh Ray"
  
  
• Hey! The administrative emails are circulating: I'm gonna be co-teaching LSU's MC 4971 - Special Topics in Mass Communication  with my friend Lance this fall. It is gonna be so special, dude. And topical! Can't wait to read my stellar Hot Professor rating! Jerri had to escort some incoming foreign students around campus yesterday and one of them asked what you call the professors: Dr.? Mr.? Sir?I'm going to have to come up with something!
  
  
• On top of that, I think I actually have now written all the writing my book needs! And just in time, for this incredible  account of Wells Tower traveling in Iceland and Greenland with his dad is making the rounds and holy crap, he's good. He describes a bar named Bar at the opening, and I don't need that kind of competition in the bar description business.

"Randolph Mantooth as Fireman John Gage"

The art of fiction. See bullet no. 5.

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Mirror Traffic (streaming at NPR)
Stephin Merritt, Obscurities (streaming at Paste)
Beirut, The Rip Tide (steaming at NPR)
Chicago Underground Duo, Sion
John Zorn, Masada: Live in Jerusalem
John Coltrane, Living Space

• I heard the first line of Mirror Traffic as I caught you streaming at NPR, which: brilliant!, but really it's I caught you streaking in your Birkenstocks, which: oh. Same difference, in a way. Also, I was at a bar this weekend and turned to my friend and said, "Wait, is this the Rockford Files theme?" and he was all, "er... this is Stevie Wonder."
  
  
  
  
• And while we are going down 70's TV show theme rabbit hole, "Randolph Mantooth as Fireman John Gage" is the manliest sentence ever committed to title credits. "Julie London as Dixie McCall, R.N." has its own archetypal hotness.
  
  
  
  
• Emergency! was the *best* show when I was eight and once a tree caught fire in our yard - my father was a teacher at the high school and our house got rolled - and they had to call the fire department right in the middle of the homecoming game. The big, townwide alert sirens went off and a stream of cars zoomed past our house on the way to the fire station, then the fire trucks all came. My father had tried to put out the fire with a hose that wouldn't reach, making the leaves on hill where the tree slippery. It was pure organic slapstick with firemen in full gear trying to get up there to put out a puny tree fire, right outside my window. Greatest moment of my childhood.
  
  
• You ever listen to John Coltrane's Living Space? Me either. There are so many. On the title track, he overdubs himself on soprano, playing just off phase to make a living space, dig? It's more than a little magical.
  
  
• I wrote a bit of fiction last night; I mean it was actual fiction and not just a conglomerate of dicey,  dubious facts under the auspice of hopefully being non-fiction. Really, it was fact-slightly-turned-to-become-fiction, a hijacking of lives to which I am privy. I've talked to a few people lately and that's how they do it so I thought I'd give it a shot and it came out OK, though I have trouble putting believable words in someone else's mouth. That's the trick, right? It's like that sandwich up there. I bought the chicken and the mayo and the celery and almonds, I made the chicken salad, I put the chicken salad on the sandwich, I took a picture of the sandwich, and then ate the sandwich. The art of fiction is to starting exposing the story somewhere around the eating.
  
  

spellcaster version

Gettin' judicious at Vintage Vinyl.

Andrej Blatnik, You Do Understand
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
Patti Smith, Twelve
Lou Reed, Animal Serenade
Blitzen Trapper, Wild Mountain Nation
László Kasznnahorkai, War and War
Ringo Starr, Ringo

• On You Do Understand: This was a great blur of a book, devoured in the time it took my daughter to find her books at the library. It is 60-odd stories on 80-odd pages, white space taking up both a big chunk of Blatnik's prose and the book itself. A quantifiably high majority of the microstories cover this arc: you play the movie of your life, whether it's one you wrote/directed/starred in or simply rented and watched; you press pause and ponder the rictus of the characters caught in mid speech, sigh at the eternal suspended animation of a sleeping one night stand as you slip on your shoes in the dark; then you press play again and the movie is totally different, or maybe you weren't following the plot is closely as you thought. (****, x-posted at Goodreads)
  
  
• Also, I would add: I like a short book.
  
  
• Twelve is mostly great, Patti Smith as the old gal at Karaoke Nite catching your ear suddenly opening up that PBS tote bag slung on her bony shoulder to release the locusts and yr all dead, husks serrated with bug bites and she's still doing the chorus like how karaoke makes you do - see her spellcaster version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", esp. around the 3:30 mark
  
  
  
• But even Patti Smith can't save "Everybody Wants to the Rule the World" from itself. The only time I've every heard somebody transcend the syrup in which the tune's admirable sentiments are suspended was when Debbie Landry did it at the long gone Alligator Bayou Bar because it was laden with tragedy; no one here was going to rule anything. The story originally appeared in Country Roads.
  
  
• Dude, everybody plays on Ringo. A guy at the record shop gave Maya the thumbs up for her choice because all four Beatles appear on it, but Marc Bolan, James Booker, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson too. I almost have her sold on Bowie and the Clash, if I can get her into T. Rex, my work will be complete. Also, we got word the band to which she's been assigned at the music studio/rock band lessons situation is named Black Diamond. Whooooo!
  
  
  
  
  

from which the baloney comes

The fresh country baloney at Cochon. It's like a map of the moon. A baloney moon.

Patti Smith, Easter
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
WWOZ
Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots


The plate from which the baloney comes.


Patti Smith, "Ghost Dance"

I am newly smitten with Patti Smith's problematic Easter, particularly the cult assimilation jam "Ghost Dance". Ive listened to it 6 times in 2 days. If she asked me to hand out flowers at the airport right now I might do it.


The manager of the Rock N Bowl is so good at hula hoop he replicates the still nucleus of a hydrogen atom encircled by a single, crucial electron, completing his nature.


Cold soba noodles at Whole Foods. Perhaps in their cold, unsalted WFM blandness can grounding be found. I might even have a green tea later to see my baloney consumer Zen process into the cloudland of enlightenment. Or I might go to the pool. Or just fall asleep right here on the couch with the rest of my family. We shall live again. xo,zz,namaste

You need a trip on the Davis ship!

This has to be the most precious office desk tableau on the Internet. Oh... I used to like to work to vinyl but now I prefer working to shellac. Do you see my book in the background? See what I did there?

Wednesday:
The Tony Williams Lifetime, Ego
tUnE-yArDs, W H O K I L L
Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong
Kurt Vile, Childish Prodigy
Curb Your Enthusiasm

In-between:
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 2 on YouTube

Thursday:
Giant Sand, Black Out
Jimmie Davis 78's
Dickie Landry, Solo
Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, Messiaen: Meditations
Wye Oak, Civilian
Louie

In between:
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

Friday:
James Gleick, The Information
Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer
Peter Bruntnell, Black Mountain U.F.O.
More 78's
Blitzen Trapper, Destroyer of the Void
Lou Reed & John Cale, Songs For Drella: A Fiction
Patti Smith, Peace and Noise and Easter
László Kasznnahorkai, War and War

• Thursday was supposed to be a writing/errand day but it pleasantly diverted into a 78rpm appreciation of the weirdness of the Singing Governor Jimmie Davis. What you need is a trip, a trip on the Davis ship!
  
  
  Jimmie Davis, "I Got News For You"
  
  
• I don't know what the Cremaster film cycle is about, nor am I sure that they are about anything, and I have not been able to watch one all the way through, and yet, I still think they are great. The bit in C2 where they part a curtain of bees and boom! there is a vagina (1:15) being penetrated by a penis that has a beehive at the tip (4:45) is something. And the bit with the drummer from Slayer sorta being Johnny Cash is cool.
  
  
  Matthew Barney, Cremaster 2 Part (2/9)
  
  
• I did get a lot of work done on the day I took off from work so I could work on my other work. I don't know if that is the American Dream or the rude awakening from it. Made me think of this:
  
  
  Lou Reed & John Cale, "Work"
  
  
• I love smart TV sitcoms. They are like finding a Godiva truffle at the bottom of a bag of store brand iced cookies.
  
  
• I brought Maya's record player up to the office to record a thing broadcasting soon on Public Radio and now I'm gonna crackle out this Friday out with a bunch of old 78's from my grandma's house that likely haven't been played since this very day in 1877 when Thomas Edison completed his first phonograph. More than once already I've been too distracted to flip the record over,and the crackly hiss of the needle bouncing off the center label is the best white noise generator there is.